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This 1959 interview with the former first lady surprised me. Introduced as the “archetype of the twentieth-century woman,” Ms. Roosevelt’s plain-spoken manner and repetitive use of the word “obligation” caught me off-guard. In our recent RV conversation with Elliot Dorff, the rabbi was adamant that we shouldn’t view helping others in need as a duty.

My first reaction was to equate “duty” and “obligation.” That was the wrong approach. Listening more deeply, I hear Ms. Roosevelt use “obligation” in the same sense that Rabbi Dorff uses “responsibility.” She speaks with a sense of doing what’s right, of being moral as a shared sense of justice.

I had thought of noblesse oblige as a literary concept, a convention intended to give flesh to fictional characters of another time, of another place, of Faulkner and Flaubert. And, even now, 50 years later, I contemplate if this idea still exists within the wealthier classes who have privilege and position — at least the idea in its humbler sense, without self-congratulation and self-aggrandizement.

Perhaps with the loss of so much wealth in the U.S. and internationally, we collectively might rediscover the best of this manner of conduct. What’s being done in the spirit of noblesse oblige nowadays that just isn’t being covered because of its quiet, serving nature? I wonder.

Reflections

Maybe the loss of concept of obligation of noblesse oblige is why we're in the situation we're in now. Wealth used to be inherited, and so with it came all kinds of identity notions passed down from grandfather/mother to grandson/daughter about obligation in a diverse community. Now, with 'creation' or more likely accumulation of pre-existing wealth in an upwardly mobile society, along with not knowing how to choose fine wine, our wealth creators don't understand the obligations of their new found place which are necessary if a society can stay in balance. Of course, the driver for this churning of wealth to the people who now hold it, has been the Chicago School or Ayn Rand philosophies of self-interest, self-serving and succeeding alone.